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Extremely frivolous stuff, but there's a fun debate going down over on Aella's twitter about personal hygiene. In short, as a true empiricist, she measures lots of stuff about her daily routine (iirc, using an app called Daylio), and recently revealed her stats for 2023. What is causing a kerfuffle is not the number of days she had sex (63), took Adderall (126), or escorted (6), but the number of times she showered, namely 37 [sic].
Aella insists she doesn't smell (and says she's consulted with others to confirm this), but I think that's a very relative statement; some people seem to have a high baseline tolerance for stank of various kinds, to the point that even strong odours don't register to them as stank, while others like myself are very smell sensitive; at the risk of TMI, my wife was amused that I could tell when our kids in their diaper days had done a pee, because I could always smell it almost immediately even when she had no idea. Back in my online dating days, there were several dates I simply couldn't follow up on because the person I was with had bad personal hygiene. I'm not talking about a mild healthy body odour here, but when you're having sex doggy-style and get hit by bad ass-stench it's an instant boner kill. And I'll be honest, I've had a crush on Aella for ages; she's a very attractive nerdy woman, and as a sexually confident and charismatic female Rationalist, she is a very horny unicorn among horses. But I've got to say, learning that specific factoid about her life had a similar effect on my idle long-distance lust as an F150's tires do on a small rodent (not that she should care, of course - just putting it out there).
That said, I am a bit of ablutomaniac - I shower and/or bathe 2-3 times a day. I don't think it's a hygiene thing per se. I shower when I get up because it helps me feel awake and ready for the day; I often have a shower or bath in the late afternoon/early evening after a workout because it feels great to soak sore muscles; and I sometimes shower just before bed, because I find it really nice to get into a bed with clean, fresh-smelling sheets having just come out of the shower smelling clean and fresh myself. I also routinely use (carefully chosen, subtle) cologne on my body as well as both fabric conditioner and scent booster when washing my clothes.
Anyway, Aella's feed is pretty funny right now, to the point that she's holding polls about showering, and I was curious what folks here think about it. Obviously me and Aella are at different ends of the ablutic spectrum, but what's a healthy normal number of times to shower/bathe per day? How much of it is down to personal preference?
Is this a common opinion? I really don't find her attractive at all. She looks like she could almost be very attractive, but there is something very offputting about her. Has she ever done a poll to see what people think of her? I was genuinely surprised when I learned how much she makes as a prostitute.
She's decently attractive, but I think it's her personality that really puts her on top.
Though perhaps some might disagree, in the least inflammatory manner possible I can only relate that it has mostly been my personal experience that your average woman has the general breadth, depth, and intensity of political, philosophical, intellectual, etc. interests of a bar of soap (whether Aella would be better off this way given recent revelations shall be left to the reader's judgment).
Thus I frequently see even women who are only a little bit more intense or slightly independent about promoting [current thing], who tweet things like "Eat the rich" and "Capitalism is slavery", get fawned over as "smart political chicks" by many men. Women who are in any way politically heterodox experience this pedestalization even more.
And for a girl like Aella, who can quite reasonably be considered to have developed a sufficiently competent corpus of decently original thinking, comparable to many posters on places like this, and who is not fat (and objectively of an above average level of fitness), not a greasy troll-looking creature (and again probably objectively at least a bit aesthetically above average facially even if she's not your personal "type"), and not biologically male? As a stereotypical Italian might say, "Fuhgeddaboudit".
I'm only surprised she hasn't hooked up with Elon Musk yet. (Though this depends on if he'd actually be comfortable with being occasionally depthmogged by a woman or not or if he just wants "smart political chicks" like Grimes to engage in mutual intellectual onanism with.)
I wouldn't put it this way, even though I think you're onto something.
I would say that a relatively high proportion of women aren't very interested in ideas or things, but people. (These being a good general categorisation of interests.) So, if a woman is even moderately interested in ideas or things, she really stands out. Similarly, to be regarded as an "fascinating conversationalist" by women on dates, a man just needs to be able to hold an interesting and intriguing conversation about people, rather than his car or sportsball team's stats.
I see this in academia: even if a woman is interested in engineering ethics, technology and psychology, physics and people etc., she will stand out as more interested in ideas/things than most women, and have a lot of dates, mentoring offers, invitations to conferences and so on. She becomes a big bait in a small pond of fish starving for a Woman in X. As always, it helps if she's at least presentably attractive.
You definitely have a point that a lot of the difference is likely a matter of inherent preference or interest as opposed to raw cognitive capability. Given sufficiently strong incentives (which is not to say ideal or desirable incentives), and given that most "intellectual" discourse is at least a quarter (sometimes necessary, sometimes not) filler if not often schlock anyway (and yes this includes my own posts to a degree), most women if they were really pushed into it could probably do a decent imitation of their male peers in IQ in engaging with the discourse of any given subject matter. (This is of course other than the specifics and depths of "harder" fields like math, physics, engineering, etc. that usually have inflexible barriers requiring a considerable degree of specifically computational/calculative cognition to surpass, a variety that is far more likely to be heavily present in biological males (though many biological males also do not possess much of this brand of cognition and are thus also filtered away from these areas, just not as many).)
Yet I still think there's a worthy amount of truth in this quote: "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." Perhaps smaller minds aren't neurologically incapable of engaging with greater subjects of consideration, but that they lack so much natural interest in it regardless nevertheless says quite a bit about them and reflects a limited, somewhat contemptible (to me anyway) or at least pitiable viewpoint.
Just on that quote - it's true that discussing math or philosophy or AI etc is better than discussing celebrities, boring workplace gossip, and the latest articles on $newssite - but that isn't a fundamental feature of 'discussing events or people', just a vague allusion at particular low-class dumb habits, both of which are just as important as 'ideas' in the right contexts. As an extreme example, a CEO has to, and should, spend a lot of time on 'people', great mind or not!
Do they really? I would expect them to spend a decent amount of time initially thinking about people to find good ones... and then I would expect them to outsource most of the rest of any thinking about people to those people (who will most likely outsource it to their own underlings etc.).
The higher up you are in the food chain of an organization, the more time I would expect you to spend focusing on conceptual matters like strategy and ideas for future advancements in whatever it is your organization offers to the world, not personnel matters (except for the rare incredibly important one).
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